Today I Learned

Oh, and a fun story about the crucifixion darkness.

So in Luke, the easiest copies described as the sun being eclipsed. Which was a huge controversy. Origen claimed it was the work of "agents of Satan."

Why? Because the Passover occurs on a full moon and solar eclipses cannot happen at those times.

What can happen are lunar eclipses. In fact they are pretty common on Passover. And those actually match a lot of the details. Last for hours and not minutes. Seen around the world vs a small band.

The problem is that this was in the middle of the day, so it would not have been visible in the area.

What a lot of people don't know is that at the time this was written, people knew how to calculate eclipses in the same Saros cycle. The Greeks even built a clockwork computer centuries earlier that did so.

As well, at the time the leading explanation was the (correct) one that lunar eclipses occurred because the Earth eclipsed the sun. Lucretius in 50 BCE wrote that it was so common it was basically presumed and he was encouraging keeping a more open mind for alternative explanations.

And there was a historical lunar eclipse on Passover in 33 CE, which would not have been visible in Judea. But importantly, this eclipse was in the same Saros cycle as visible lunar eclipses before and after.

It is not all that implausible that people, particularly Greek or Chaldean astronomers, would have known that there was a several hour long eclipse of the sun during the day on Passover in 33 CE.

My guess is that knowledge of a calculated lunar eclipse ended up incorporated into the early Synoptic circles (potentially even by the author of Luke given the mention of the Joel blood moon prophecy in Acts) and then further mythologized having lost the original context as if an eyewitness event like in Matthew where the author added earthquakes and zombies.

TL;DR: There probably was a daytime lunar eclipse on a Passover around that time which would have been fairly trivially calculable as having occurred given its earlier and later 51 CE visible occurrences in the cycle.

Edit: Some relevant links.

• NASA lunar eclipses 1st century table
• Antikythera mechanism
• Lucretius book 5 (it's right at line 750)

They aren't binary options.

For example, it's also possible that there was a real person, but that then a lot of biographical details were added in and made up.

But it's quite unlikely that the entire story is made up, in large part because of how much of the narrative is dealing with trying to claim that other people are wrong about it.

The earliest records are from a guy known to his audience as persecuting Jesus's followers. Who then complains that his audience has accepted a different version of Jesus.

The earliest canonical narratives in Peter's own tradition are trying to explain why he was present in the area where a trial that required bringing witnesses before the accused where two or more needed to agree for testimony to be considered was reportedly denying him there.

You simply don't see details like that with made up supernatural narratives. Where's the story about Mithras keeping his status secret and only making claims of being a promised savior in private? In the story where Dionysus is captured by pirates is there a weird line about someone running down the street butt naked?

The earliest texts in the Christian corpus have very odd nuances compared to pretty much all other fully fictional traditions we're aware of, but those nuances are in line with what we see with more modern cults around a figure who ends up dead or imprisoned where there's then competing splits thereafter.

It is very, very unlikely the accounts are 100% true, even in matters separate from the magic stuff. They are even outright at odds with each other. For example, John 18:20 makes a claim nothing was said in secret but the Synoptics all have secret explanations for at least the sower parable.

But the idea there was no historical individual at the kernel of it all is quite unlikely as well. There's too much evidence the first century tradition is battling over the details of a record regarding a real centralizing figure that does not occur with synecretized or fabricated mythos.

Just because L Ron Hubbard was not a great war hero as Scientology claims does not imply there was no historical person named L Ron Hubbard founding the tradition that later made stuff up about him.

Iirc the current consensus among critical/secular Bible scholars is that he was probably a real guy, but the stories about him in the Bible are mostly fictional (eg, he was probably born in Nazareth, not Bethlehem, did not have any supernatural abilities, and did not resurrect after being executed). Pretty sure Josephus, a historian who wrote a few decades after the historical Jesus would have died mentioned him, and iirc there's at least one or two other mentions of him in non-Christian sources (or non Christian adjacent, Christian orthodoxy hadn't really formed yet) from the first century CE.

Imo the most likely scenario is that the historical Jesus was an apocalyptic Jewish preacher who publicly opposed the Roman state and was executed for it, and most of what we consider modern Christianity was invented by Paul and his clique.

Oi

I want to read the banned books. Can you do that?

hOW dARe yOu jEsUs wAs a WHiTe AmERiCaN mAn anD thE BIbLe IS tHE wORd Of GOD!!!

Could be both tbh. He is literally described as man and God at the same time.